Mag-log inElara's POV"You look terrible," Sullivan said."You collapsed in your own boardroom and I flew here from a crime scene. Between us we've had quite a morning." I pulled the chair to his bedside and sat, and his hand found mine on the blanket before I'd finished sitting, which told me more about the last twenty minutes than any chart could. "The nurse said you were holding the doctors hostage.""Negotiating." His color was wrong — grey under the tan, the tan itself thinner than it had been on a screen last week. Wires ran from him to three machines that each had opinions. "There's a scan this afternoon. There's a specialist flying up from Melbourne tonight. There's a word they keep almost saying and then not saying, and I've decided I'll hear it after I've said mine, because mine's been waiting six months and theirs can wait four hours.""Sullivan —""Dave." He said it and then looked almost embarrassed, an expression I'd seen on his face maybe twice in five years. "Or not. Or whatever
Elara's POV"Mooring nine."Danvers said it from the bottom of my stairs at six in the morning, phone still in her hand.I came down fully dressed, and behind me Ian appeared in the hallway with both phones like he'd never gone to bed at all."A cruiser, forty-foot, registered to a shelf company in Brisbane eleven weeks old. Thermal picked up one adult male on board at four a.m. One." Danvers held my eyes while the number landed. "We go in thirty minutes. You can be at the staging point. You cannot be on the water. That's the deal.""Take it," Ian said quietly behind me, before I could bargain. "Elara. Take the deal."The staging point was a boat ramp with a public toilet block and a view of grey water folding itself over and over. I stood at the bonnet of Danvers' car with a radio I wasn't allowed to speak into and watched two inflatables cross the river in the flat dawn light like they had nowhere urgent to be, which is how professionals cross water. Ian stood on the other side of
Elara's POV"Read it to me again.""Elara, you've heard it four —""The last paragraph, Avery. Again."Static and paper on the other end of the world. Then Avery's voice, careful, level, reading a dead-tired man's handwriting for the fifth time down a phone line: "If it goes wrong, it goes wrong because I got close. Don't look for me where I parked — look at what's forty minutes past it. He booked nothing. Men like this don't fly out with cargo, they drive to water. E — the boats. It was always boats. — L.""Forty minutes past Parramatta," I said. "Toward water.""That's the Hawkesbury," Danvers said from across my kitchen table, already pulling the map around. Three days now she'd worked out of my kitchen, and the table had disappeared under charts of a coastline that had more hiding places than a coastline had any right to have. "River systems, private moorings, oyster leases, four hundred places to put a boat you don't want found. But." She tapped the map twice. "It cuts the search
Elara's POV"Madam, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I only turned around for —""Mrs. Adele." I took both her hands before the rest of the sentence could break her. "Look at me. Where are Noah and Emily?""Upstairs. Sleeping. The police lady is with them — they wouldn't sleep, and then they did, all at once, the way they do." Her hands were cold in mine, twenty-two hours after, still cold. "Madam, the garden — I only went in for the sunscreen, Claire wanted her yellow hat, and when I came back the gate —""You went in for sunscreen because it was hot and she is four and burns in twenty minutes. You did your job." I said it slowly, once, and watched it fail to land, and knew it would need saying a hundred more times before it did. "Now I need everything. From the beginning, in order."The house didn't feel like my house. Fourteen hours in the air and I'd walked through my own front door into a place with two federal officers in the kitchen, a technician doing something to the landline, and
Ian's POV"Get out of the car, Camila."She hadn't moved in twenty minutes. The bridal car had brought her back to the house because no one else would take her — her own security had peeled off before the Haverton gates, the planner wasn't answering, Petra's phone went straight to a voicemail that no longer said Vale Group — and now she sat in the back seat in the dress, in the driveway, while the driver stood as far from the vehicle as the job allowed.I opened the door myself. She stared straight ahead through the windshield at nothing.She didn't move for twenty minutes. Just sat in the back seat in the dress, in the driveway, while the driver stood at the far end of the gravel with a cigarette.I opened the door myself. She stared straight ahead through the windshield."They're saying I confessed," she said. "The clips. They've cut it so it sounds like —""You did confess.""They edited —""Three hundred phones, Camila. There is no edit. There's just you." The last of the light ca
Elara's POV"She doesn't spook," the stable owner said, handing me the reins. "Crowds, flags, gunfire on film shoots. Nothing moves her unless you move her.""What's her name?""Justice." He said it without a trace of irony, checking the girth strap a final time. "The previous owner had a sense of humor."I didn't laugh, because the previous owner was Morticia. That lady had anything but a sense of humor.The bridle path ran exactly as the deed said it would — service road, then trees, thirty years of nobody, branches grown low enough that I rode the first kilometer bent over the mare's neck. Through the leaves the Haverton came up in pieces. White chairs. The drone hanging over the lawn like a patient insect. Three hundred guests and a string quartet playing something that had been played at my own wedding, ten years and one ocean ago.My phone had gone to Liam four times since dawn. Four rings each, then nothing. Ivy couldn't raise him. Marco said Thursday, a pushed fitting, a note,
Elara's POV I followed Ian out of the fashion show and kept my distance, slipping behind a marble pillar in the corridor. My pulse was steady, trained to hide itself; my breath slow. From my hiding place I could hear him—low, flat—answering a call.“You need to hurry up with Camila,” his mother’s
Elara's POV “What are you thinking about, Mum?” Noah’s small voice pulled me from my thoughts.“Nothing much, dear,” I said softly, smiling at him. “I was just remembering the day I gave birth to my lovely triplets. I love you, my children.”“Mum,” Emily said, her eyes sparkling with mischief, “we
Elara's POV My fingers trembled so hard I could barely unlock my phone. One deep breath. One last ounce of courage. Then I hit send — the recording, Ian’s confession, every single shred of betrayal he had thrown at me. I attached it all with a note that burned like poison on my tongue.> “Let’s se
Elara's POV The streetlight above me flickered, throwing broken shadows across the driveway as I stood there, gripping the divorce papers like they were the only thing keeping me from falling apart. My hands were shaking so badly the pages rustled in the night air. I don’t even remember the dri







